PowerVM¶
Introduction¶
OpenStack Compute supports the PowerVM hypervisor through NovaLink. In the
NovaLink architecture, a thin NovaLink virtual machine running on the Power
system manages virtualization for that system. The nova-compute
service
can be installed on the NovaLink virtual machine and configured to use the
PowerVM compute driver. No external management element (e.g. Hardware
Management Console) is needed.
Configuration¶
In order to function properly, the nova-compute
service must be executed
by a member of the pvm_admin
group. Use the usermod
command to add the
user. For example, to add the stacker
user to the pvm_admin
group, execute:
# usermod -a -G pvm_admin stacker
The user must re-login for the change to take effect.
To enable the PowerVM compute driver, configure
DEFAULT.compute_driver
= powervm.PowerVMDriver
. For
example:
[DEFAULT]
compute_driver = powervm.PowerVMDriver
The PowerVM driver supports two types of storage for ephemeral disks:
localdisk
or ssp
. If localdisk
is selected, you must specify which
volume group should be used. E.g.:
[powervm]
disk_driver = localdisk
volume_group_name = openstackvg
Note
Using the rootvg
volume group is strongly discouraged since rootvg
is used by the management partition and filling this will cause failures.
The PowerVM driver also supports configuring the default amount of physical
processor compute power (known as “proc units”) which will be given to each
vCPU. This value will be used if the requested flavor does not specify the
powervm:proc_units
extra-spec. A factor value of 1.0 means a whole physical
processor, whereas 0.05 means 1/20th of a physical processor. E.g.:
[powervm]
proc_units_factor = 0.1
Volume Support¶
Volume support is provided for the PowerVM virt driver via Cinder. Currently, the only supported volume protocol is vSCSI Fibre Channel. Attach, detach, and extend are the operations supported by the PowerVM vSCSI FC volume adapter. Boot From Volume is not yet supported.